He's the one who entrusted me with my academic lineage, and Carl has been deeply involved with Zen for his adult life. He was a student of Suzuki Roshi, he went and practiced in Japan, and he's dedicated his academic career to studying Dogen and Soto Zen, and you won't find many people who are as deeply affected by his contact with Soto Zen as Carl, so thank you. Thank you Gil, and thank you for setting up the conference, it's very nice. Actually, this conference is the first of what I think Gil and I both hope will be a long-going, long-time relationship between the new Sachi Center for Buddhist Studies and

[01:06]

our Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford, and I think it's particularly appropriate that we start it with something so dear to the hearts of both Gil and myself. Gil told me that what I was to do was to speak very briefly about what you might call the other side of Suzuki Roshi's background in Japan, namely, whereas Richard was talking about the institutional developments, I was to speak a little bit about the intellectual world of Soto Zen at the beginning of the 20th century when Suzuki Roshi was coming of age. So that's what I'll do, I won't be able to talk in broad terms about Soto Zen intellectual life, but I would like to touch on a few people who were particularly important for Suzuki Roshi himself. Suzuki was born in 1904, that is the late Meiji period that

[02:07]

Richard was talking about that ends in 1912, and came of age in a period known as the Taisho, which goes from 1912 to 1926. This was a very volatile time, not only institutionally for Soto Zen and Japanese Buddhism, but also intellectually, a time when Soto Zen, like Buddhism in general, and like Japanese culture in general, was going through extraordinary intellectual change. The Taisho period, for example, is often known as a period, a kind of window of liberalism in Japan, a period between the rest of the Japanese War and the Pacific War, in which Japanese society experimented with socialism, with communism, with democratic forms and party politics and so on. This is a time just when Suzuki Roshi would have been a young man living in Tokyo, the center

[03:11]

of all this kind of activity. In Buddhist terms, this is really the period in which we see the development of modern Japanese Buddhism. Intellectually speaking, it goes in two directions, I think. One is internationalization and the other popularization. As Richard mentioned, Japanese Buddhism had been persecuted at the beginning of the Meiji period, back in the second half of the 19th century, and was forced willy-nilly to then to reconsider itself. It had a very different status in society and it realized that its old forms of teaching and understanding itself had to be redone. We see throughout the last part of the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th century an extraordinary effort by all the different schools of Japanese Buddhism to rethink themselves. Part of this

[04:12]

involved thinking of themselves as Buddhists rather than as, say, Jodo Shinshu Buddhists or Soto Zen Buddhists. That is to say, stepping back and looking at the Buddhist tradition as a whole for the first time, world Buddhism, and imagining their place within this much larger Buddhist tradition. So we see at this time new forms of Buddhist scholarship that had never existed in Japan of people going to Europe and going to India, studying Sanskrit, Pali, and eventually Tibetan, and trying to understand Buddhism in this broad international mode that they were learning from the new scholarship on Buddhism that was being done in Europe and America. So this is one element of the internationalization. But another very important element of this is not just the broadening of the notion of Buddhism, but the placing of Buddhism within the context of religion. Religion, the term shukyo, by which the Japanese

[05:14]

now speak of religion, was not a traditional category of understanding. Buddhism was not a religion until the 19th century and the study of Western scholarship in which the category religion was found and translated into Japanese. And so for the first time, Japanese Buddhists were asking themselves, what is Buddhism as a religion? What is religion? They became very interested in the new science of religion, as it was called, in comparative religion, in the philosophy of religion, and tried to reimagine Buddhism as a whole and their own particular sectarian traditions in terms of this category. What does it mean to be a religion? What kind of a religion are we? This is one element, then, the kind of new international modern understanding of Buddhism. The second is popular outreach. Whereas the Buddhists of the Edo period, that is the period just before the Meiji, had been more or less in fiefd by the government with their own congregations, their own property, their own sort of self-contained

[06:20]

institutional units. Now, when they were disenfranchised and thrown open into competition for believers and competition for the resources of the community, they began to develop new ways of reaching out to that community, new forms of publishing and of preaching, of organizing new groups, magazines, new kinds of teachings of various sorts directed towards the lay populace in a manner that had never really been tried before. Sotoshu was right at the center of this kind of new movement in Buddhism. We see the development of new forms of scholarship, working on the modern textual studies of the Shobogenzo, for example. During this time, we see Soto scholars trying to understand Soto Zen within the broader context of Buddhism, place it in relation to Indian and Chinese Buddhism, for example, and Soto scholars working on

[07:20]

the religion as a philosophy, especially the study of Dogen as a religious thinker becomes prominent during the first years of the 20th century. And we see Soto very much engaged in public outreach. The end of the 19th century, the Sotoshu published a work called the Shushogi, which brought together passages from Dogen's Shobogenzo that were particularly appropriate for lay teaching and produced then this book, Shushogi, which was then the subject of many, many commentaries and lectures and books done by the Sotoshu to try to bring Soto teachings out to the lay public. And in addition, they started new magazines of various kinds, they started new study groups of all sorts to which both monks and laymen could attend. So Suzuki Roshi then grew up in a world where things were changing very rapidly and Soto Zen was reaching out in a way that he would later himself reach out in a very different context.

[08:23]

Suzuki was ordained in 1917 and took Shiho from his master, Gyokujun Soen, in 1926, the year that he entered Komazawa University. This is the first year of the Showa era, the era we just completed with the death of the Showa emperor a few years ago, a time of great openness and change in Japanese society. And for Sotoshu, perhaps noted especially as the year in which the famous Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro published his book Shamon Dogen or Dogen the monk, which is often held up to be the first work to bring Dogen to the general Japanese public as a great religious thinker. When Suzuki Roshi entered Komazawa in this year 1926, the university itself was in the process

[09:27]

of transforming itself into a modern private university. This university, Komazawa, located in Tokyo, traces its origins back to the 16th century to a place called Sendanbin, a study center for Soto monks that had been established in a monastery in Tokyo named Kichijoji. And Soto monks during the Edo period, that is from the 1600 on, used to go there to be trained in Soto studies. In the Meiji period, this institution was transformed into something called the Sotoshu Daigaku or Sotoshu Daigakudin, it was first called, in which more systematic attempts at the study not only of Soto but of Buddhism more broadly, more modern attempts were introduced. The year before Suzuki Roshi entered, the institution changed its name to Komazawa University, signaling that it was now not simply an institution for monks to study Buddhism,

[10:32]

but it was a modern private university, which it has gone on to be in the 20th century and has become a quite prominent private university in Tokyo. Already in the Meiji period before Suzuki Roshi went there, this Komazawa, or what was then called Sotoshu Daigakudin, had been a center for the training of Buddhists who were interested in the new more international style of study, people like Kimura Taiken and the famous Ui Hakuju, who was for long a professor at Tokyo University and then Tohoku University, one of the leading authorities, early leading Japanese authorities on Indian Buddhism, but also very closely connected with the Sotoshu, and indeed after he retired from Tokyo University, he became a professor at Komazawa and eventually became head of Komazawa University. And similarly, in Zen studies, people like Yamada Kodo, who

[11:33]

produced the first modern dictionary of Zen Buddhism, or particularly important for Suzuki Roshi, a man named Oka Sotan. I don't know, he's not up here, no. Oka Sotan was born in 1860 and became a professor at the Sotoshu Daigakudin, and the first lecturer in a very important new movement that was started at Eiheiji at the beginning of the 20th century, a series of lectures on the Shobogenzo that greatly transformed the Sotoshu understanding of Dogen and the Shobogenzo, and Oka Sotan was the initiator of these lectures. He went on to become the head of Komazawa University and was one of the leading figures then in the teaching of Shobogenzo in the 20th century. Oka Sotan was the teacher of Gyokujun Soen, who was Suzuki Roshi's first teacher, I think.

[12:38]

There's Gyokujun Soen, you can see him during the break. So in the 1920s, when Suzuki Roshi came to Komazawa, the school had a number of very important scholars working in the new international creation of Buddhist studies in Japan. Men like Omori Zenkai, a very interesting man who went off to the U.S., spent a lot of time in the U.S. in places like West Virginia, unusual sorts of places for people at the beginning of the 20th century to visit. Maybe they still are today, at least for Japanese scholars to visit. He was very interested in the philosophy of religion and comparative religion. He was teaching at Komazawa when Suzuki was there. And a man named Tachibana Shundo, who was a scholar of Pali, who had studied in Europe and South Asia and eventually did a dissertation at Oxford.

[13:43]

And some of you may have come across his book, The Ethics of Buddhism. It was published in 1926, the year that Suzuki Roshi came to Komazawa. So there were these types of scholars and there were also scholars working on the new Soto Zen studies, especially focused on Dogen and the Shobogenzo, men like Ando Bun'e and Jinbo Nyoten, who together produced a very important work that brought together all the traditional commentaries, not all quite, but the most famous traditional commentaries on the Shobogenzo, such that by Suzuki Roshi's day a person could sit down and read texts of the Shobogenzo together with what all the masters going back to Kamakura times had said about the passages in the Shobogenzo, a very important resource for transforming Soto Zen studies. And also people interested in Soto as a philosophy, men like Okada Giho, who was a head of Komazawa University, and went on to publish a big systematic account of the Shobogenzo,

[14:50]

that is to say he's a man who treats Shobogenzo as a systematic philosophy in parallel with western type philosophers like Kant and Hegel and tried to lay out the system of the Shobogenzo. And also people interested in the Shobogenzo as religion, as religious teaching, especially important at this time at Komazawa was a man named Eto Sokuo, who was probably the foremost figure in producing the new Shobogenzo studies that have still continued today. He taught a very broad sense, he was a specialist in the Shobogenzo and in fact edited the first popular version of the Shobogenzo, but he taught a very broad approach to Buddhist studies, to Soto Zen within the context of Buddhist studies, and did another thing that's important to remember about these types of scholars, he emphasized the combination of scholarship and practice, that is to say many of these scholars, typically these scholars were also monks, had their own temples

[15:53]

and tried more or less, depending upon the individual, to integrate their study of the Buddhist practice. Perhaps the most interesting and important of this type of scholar present at Komazawa at the time that Suzuki Hiroshi went there was the man who was at that time the president of the university, Nukariya Kaiten. I don't know how many of you have come across this name, Nukariya Kaiten, but he was a man who very early on went to Europe and the US and studied there for several years, and while abroad published what was really the first well-known book about Zen Buddhism in English called the Religion of the Samurai. I don't know if any of you have come across this book, but I encourage you to look it up, it's fascinating. Very early study of explaining Zen and especially Soto Zen in the West. Nukariya Kaiten combined scholarship with

[16:57]

popularization of Soto. He was very active in trying to re-explain Soto to a lay audience in common terms, and in fact the year that Suzuki Hiroshi came into Komazawa he published a little book called the Shoshin Mondo, that is to say, Questions and Answers about True Faith, literally, in which he tried to lay out simple principles of Soto Zen as a religion for everyone. This book actually became quite controversial and in the years following he got into a considerable debate with Harada Sogaku and other people saying, well Soto Zen is not so simple, you can't just package it for laymen like that, this is just pop Zen and we won't have anything of it, and it was quite a debate called the True Faith Debate that ran throughout the 1920s when Suzuki Hiroshi was at Komazawa. This Nukariya Kaiten was Suzuki Hiroshi's advisor at Komazawa and when Suzuki Hiroshi

[17:59]

graduated he wrote a thesis, a graduation thesis under Nukariya Kaiten. It's called which translates as something like Dogen's religion as seen especially in the chapter of the Shobogenzo called Daihai Tokuzui. This chapter as many of you know is quite famous actually, it's somewhat notorious even, because it's about the importance of submission to the master, that's what the theme of the chapter is. But much of the chapter is taken up with a question of women and Dogen's attack on those people who think that women are inferior. So it's been held up by the women's movement in Sotoshu as an example of the founder's sense of egalitarianism in regard to gender issues. Recently I got a copy of Suzuki Hiroshi's

[19:01]

graduation thesis from Komazawa and I haven't had a chance to read it yet but I did look to see whether he was a champion of women's rights and it turns out he wasn't interested in that issue at all. He's much more interested in the relationship between master and disciple in general. But one of the interesting things about that dissertation is that he clearly reflects Nukariya Kaiten's interest in treating Soto Zen as religious experience. He frames the entire essay. Have you read this, your father's dissertation? You haven't read it? Oh, I showed it to you. Maybe I'll bring it tomorrow, you can read it, yeah. But he's interested, clearly Suzuki Hiroshi at this time is interested in shukyo keiken, that is to say religious experience, a category that had been borrowed from western philosophers like William James and he cites people like Watsuji Tetsuro and Nishida Kitaro as his sources along

[20:03]

with his advisor Nukariya Kaiten. So he was obviously reading the new literature of Japanese philosophy at this time. He studies the shobogenzo in his graduation thesis but his real study of the shobogenzo seems to have taken place after he left Komazawa. In 1930 he graduated and he went to Eiheiji for a short period of training and there he was an attendant to a famous monk named Kishizawa Ion. He's the one on the far left, up there. And this was the beginning of a long association that Suzuki Hiroshi had with this older monk. Kishizawa Ion was perhaps the leading interpreter of the shobogenzo of his day. He had been a student of the most famous Meiji scholar of the shobogenzo, Nishiyari Bokusan,

[21:06]

who was also the teacher of Oka Sotan. Nishiyari was in some ways the leading figure of Sotoshu in the 19th century, not only as a scholar but he was also appointed daikogi, that is to say, master lecturer at the new religious academy called the Kyobusho that was set up by the Meiji government for the study of the various Buddhist teachings. And he represented, Nishiyari represented Sotoshu teaching at that, and he went on to become the abbot of Sojiji and the head of the Sotoshu. But he's best known for the work that he did on the shobogenzo, especially a famous commentary called the Shobogenzo Keiteki, which still to this day is probably the favorite commentary on this book. Kishizawa Ion Roshi, Suzuki Roshi's teacher,

[22:07]

who studied with Nishiyari Bokusan, was born in 1865. He was not, his career was not typical of Soto monks at this time. That is to say, he started out in a secular career as a school teacher and then converted after studying with Nishiyari Bokusan, converted to Buddhism and became ordained at the age of 32, so it's never too late, and received shiho, that is to say, transmission from Nishiyari at the age of 36, went on to be the abbot of several temples, and then to live at Eheiji, where Suzuki Roshi met him, as what's called the seido, that is to say, it's a position of those people who have been former abbots and are now living at Eheiji. And he lectured there for 13 years in the genzo, as it's called, the lecture series on the shobo genzo. He had many, many writings, he was a very prolific man. He wrote on the five-rank theory of Soto Shu, he wrote on Soto Shu precepts and so on, but he's

[23:18]

best known for a very large commentary on the shobo genzo. During the years that Suzuki Roshi was studying with him, he was lecturing constantly on the shobo genzo in what he called kattoshu, these were collections of katto, means like a koan collection. He would write on different fascicles of the shobo genzo and publish them in various places, and eventually his lectures were brought together long after this time in the most extensive commentary I think has ever been done on the shobo genzo in 24 volumes called Shobo Genzo Zenko. So Suzuki Roshi met this man, and in fact we have, I remember still some stories he had about the Kishizawa Iyan, especially the famous bitter tea story that we'll probably hear about this weekend. But he met him at Eheiji and then Suzuki Roshi left and went on, he went back to his own temple to Zoin-in and then to Rinzoin,

[24:19]

but Kishizawa Roshi left Eheiji a couple years after Suzuki Roshi did and moved to a temple called Gyokuden Iyan that was in Shizuoka, right near Suzuki Roshi's own temple at Rinzoin, and there he set himself up and continued his lectures on the shobo genzo and Suzuki Roshi then commuted just a few miles that it was from his own temple to study with Kishizawa Roshi from 1932 right up until Kishizawa's death in 1955, soon after which Suzuki Roshi himself left for America. So I'm going to stop, and Gil, you said there'd be some time for people to... Two questions. Right. The original idea, when he thought that Zen students could keep to the time, was that Richard and I would talk for a while and then we'd have some time for questions about both our talks, and now it turns out very little of such time.

[25:24]

Questions or comments? Yeah. When you said that Kishizawa Iyan was giving lectures, series of lectures, were they directed primarily toward monks, or was he one, as you referenced, beginning to have that outreach to address his teachings to a lay audience? The question was, was Kishizawa Roshi's teaching directed only to monks or also to laymen? It was very much directed to the public, actually. He didn't just lecture, he published what he was lecturing on regularly. That is to say, his collected commentaries came out much later, after his death, but he was himself publishing all through the period that he was studying with Suzuki Roshi in popular journals that were quite accessible to the public. And if you read his

[26:29]

commentaries, they're very colloquial kinds of commentaries, very kind in a way in that he goes into extraordinary detail. That's why it took 24 volumes to put them out. Earl, the question in the way of this establishment, what you really touched on, the denominationalizing of Soto Shu in this period, and Richard's point about movement from a clergy that's at least officially celibate to a married, can you say a little bit about what that has to do with us? For example, the ideal of a priesthood of all believers tied to this kind of religious public, to catechism, to writing, to teaching, within that context. In some ways, that is what we take for granted. There is no established church, there is a kind of Protestant priesthood of believers,

[27:31]

which we're all arguing we want to in this form or that form of procedure. Yeah, I think you just commented on it. Well, I think one of the things I'd like to reiterate, in effect, the point that Richard was making on an institutional side, an intellectual side, Suzuki Doshi came of age at a time when the way you understood and taught Buddhism was wide open. It was a time of experiment. And here again, I think he was well prepared, you might say, intellectually by being exposed to this sort of volatile environment and experimental forms of teaching to take it another step and bring it out into the world. So in a couple of minutes, we'll take a break. Before we do,

[28:40]

I wanted to read a remarkable letter that Suzuki Doshi wrote in May 17th, 1966, to a woman named Helen Walker. Does anybody know her? Is she here? And the reason I want to read this is you get a sense of the great impact that his main teacher, Gyakujin Son, had on him. Carl talked about intellectual influences, and one of the things that struck me is that one of the sometimes dismissive statements that seems to be made about Suzuki Doshi is, sometimes by Japanese priests, is, oh, Suzuki Doshi was just a village priest. And he was apparently a village priest, but he was also apparently in very much close contact with some of the most influential intellectual teachers of Soto Zen of his time.

[29:45]

He wasn't kind of just tucked away in the countryside, out of touch with what was really going on. So he had the intellectual influence, but he also had the very personal training, and starting from when he was about 11 or 12 years old, of working very closely with Gyakujin Son, whose training wasn't seemingly not so intellectual, but was a training of tremendous strictness, so strict that apparently Suzuki Doshi was afraid of him. And this fear that Suzuki Doshi had of his own teacher seems to come out in this letter that he writes to Helen Walker. I am so sorry that my letter did not reach you. Since I came home, I have been so busy that at last, while I was reading a scripture with other priests, I lost my senses. I did not fall down from my chair or feel dizzy, but perspiration was bad enough to call the attention of the chairman who came to me and asked something to whom I said, I'm all right.

[30:49]

The scripture that we were reading was the one of the most familiar ones to us all, but strangely enough, my mouth did not go on. I tried to follow the characters, but I was unable to do it. My mind faded into the memories of my boyhood when I was trying hard to follow the difficult Chinese characters and reciting voice of my master. In those experiences, I used to be so scared of my master rather than feeling ashamed of myself in front of the many people who might have been watching me. If I died at that moment, I would have been banished in this memory. I think I know that I was always so sure that even though the experiences I had under my master was very, very hard ones, but they are all beautiful and unselfish, true ones. And I think this is why I lose myself in those memories. Quite a record.

[31:55]

So, before we go on, is the amplification of the sound okay here today with people in the back? Okay. And so I thought we would take a 25-minute break and in 20 minutes someone's going to go around and ring bells. And bells, by the way, for people who are trained in Zen, means you stop what you're doing and you come to the next thing in the schedule. Thank you.

[32:26]

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